Earlimart’s Silver Lake Success Story

By Susan Brooks

Photo by Dan Monick

Over the course of a decade-long career, L.A.’s Earlimart has carved out a niche as pioneers of the celebrated Silver Lake music scene. Aaron Espinoza, co-founder of the band along with Ariana Murray, has a lot to say about the neighborhood’s coming-of-age: “The people that live there, the friends we have there,” he says, “those are the people that have been coming to see our band for ten years now and have supported us for that long. Without all that I don’t know where we’d be. The bands are sort of a spin-off of all the people that are supporting the whole thing.”

The band’s lineup, which has varied over time, has been pared down to just Espinoza and Murray. The pair met after Espinoza moved to L.A. from his native Fresno, and named the band after Earlimart, CA, a small town located between the two. Espinoza and Murray have lived in Silver Lake almost since the inception of its now white-hot scene, giving them an interesting perspective on its maturation, which is finally boiling over hand in hand with the release of their new album.

Mentor Tormentor, their fifth and newest album, was released late this summer on Majordomo, their brand new label. In partnership with Shout! Factory Records, and distributed through Sony, the imprint will provide a reach towards an audience beyond the band’s steadfast homegrown indie community. Earlimart also plans to sign similarly disposed groups as well.

It won’t be the group’s first position as creative lynchpins either — they’ve long cultivated relationships with Silver Lake artists through their slowly developing studio, The Ship. Throughout the last ten years, that collectively owned space in nearby Eagle Rock has served as an axis for the many artists who were drawn to the area for its mix of camaraderie and creative stimulation. Espinoza is a true producer who expertly helms The Ship and his well-known talents attract a high caliber of artists: musicians who’ve recorded with him include Grandaddy, Irving, The Breeders, Silversun Pickups and Elliott Smith.

The Ship concept has also included elements of an artist’s collective for some of those bands and others, but Espinoza demurs that that was due to any sort of deliberately organized effort. “It’s kind of a loose term, it wasn’t this massive scheme to take over the world with, like, this secret society. In a cool way it kind of helped push everybody out of the nest. I think it was just a starting point.”

That collective aspect may have evolved, however unintentionally, into the thought process behind the Majordomo label. “We did for a couple of years have a website that was functional,” he says. “We put out compilations, we always had a small record label. But I think at the end of the day, it turned into a group of people all kind of with the same mindset, maybe.”

When Earlimart found they needed a new label, they looked at the whole spectrum of alternatives and felt they wanted a partnership for the long haul, deciding on Shout! Factory as the best fit. They wanted creative control and the chance to curate a complementary roster of other acts without running the business side themselves. The mutually beneficial deal they struck allowed for all of that, while in turn providing the partner company with a natural conduit into a vibrant music community.

Both the album and the new record deal were two years in the making, involving a protracted process for each during a difficult time for the band (label, lineup and personal problems all came into play), but Espinoza tries to look at it in a positive light. “The thing about it is that, despite the turmoil, I remember Ariana and I would be sitting at the studio and we’d be like, man, this stuff’s awesome. Maybe all things that are good are hard to do.”

Espinoza’s pride in the record is justifiable. Mentor Tormentor is a very strong album, with 14 fully-realized songs that fit together in subtle ways. Lots of acoustic guitar lushly melds with piano, bass, Espinoza’s gentle, breathy singing, and interesting tweaks like the handclaps and whistling on “Nothing is True.” That track illustrates some of the band’s innovative production ideas too — they drop sound clips like T.V. static right in the middle of the songs, introducing hints of edgy ambiguity to an otherwise mellow feel. The track preceding that is a short instrumental appropriately named “Segue,” which fades in and out strangely in a way that briefly suspends time, as if the song was something going on forever that we happened to tune in for a haunting moment.

It’s the deft touches like that that put the art in Earlimart. The band’s sound possesses something indefinably organic originating from the combination of basic rock and roll chords with layered texturing and straightforward lyrics that still convey graduated nuances of emotion. Murray describes the album as being “about the gray area in relationships,” with the title itself evoking a difficult but rewarding interaction. She herself contributes outstanding vocals, harmonizing with Espinoza on many songs and taking the lead in several places as well, including on “Happy Alone,” the first Earlimart song she’s written alone.

With ten solid years behind them, a true commitment to their vision, and a customized deal to shape their course, Earlimart is enviably positioned. Espinoza wants to continue producing other bands as well as creating original material with Murray, and both are excited about the opportunity they have with Majordomo to, as Espinoza puts it, “have a hand in someone else’s career.” He sums up, “We wanted to find something that we could really be involved with and be involved in our own futures. We want to do this for a long time.”

www.earlimartmusic.com